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  1. Save the Five: Meeting Taurek's Challenge.Zach Barnett - forthcoming - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
    Six people are in trouble. We can save five of them or just the sixth. What should we do? John Taurek (1977) defends a radical view: We are not required to save the greater number. Taurek's paper has persuaded some. But even the unpersuaded agree that Taurek poses a deep and important challenge: From where does the priority of the many derive? It seems difficult, or even impossible, to convince someone who denies the importance of the numbers... to care about (...)
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  2. Partiality, Asymmetries, and Morality's Harmonious Propensity.Benjamin Lange & Joshua Brandt - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):1-42.
    We argue for asymmetries between positive and negative partiality. Specifically, we defend four claims: i) there are forms of negative partiality that do not have positive counterparts; ii) the directionality of personal relationships has distinct effects on positive and negative partiality; iii) the extent of the interactions within a relationship affects positive and negative partiality differently; and iv) positive and negative partiality have different scope restrictions. We argue that these asymmetries point to a more fundamental moral principle, which we call (...)
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  3. (1 other version)On the desire to make a difference.Hilary Greaves, Teruji Thomas, Andreas Mogensen & William MacAskill - 2024 - Philosophical Studies 181 (6):1599-1626.
    True benevolence is, most fundamentally, a desire that the world be better. It is natural and common, however, to frame thinking about benevolence indirectly, in terms of a desire to make a difference to how good the world is. This would be an innocuous shift if desires to make a difference were extensionally equivalent to desires that the world be better. This paper shows that at least on some common ways of making a “desire to make a difference” precise, this (...)
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  4. Circumstantial and constitutive moral luck in Kant's moral philosophy.Robert J. Hartman - 2024 - European Journal of Philosophy 32 (2):353-359.
    The received view of Kant’s moral philosophy is that it precludes all moral luck. But I offer a plausible interpretation according to which Kant embraces moral luck in circumstance and constitution. I interpret the unconditioned nature of transcendental freedom as a person’s ability to do the right thing no matter how she is inclined by her circumstantial and constitutive luck. I argue that various passages about degrees of difficulty relating to circumstantial and constitutive luck provide a reason to accept a (...)
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  5. Kantsequentialism and Agent-Centered Options.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    In this, the sixth chapter of _Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends_, I argue that the duty of beneficence is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end and (b) to refrain from acting in a way that would manifest one’s failure to do so. What’s more, I argue that Kantsequentialism offers us the best account of whether an act manifests a failure to have adopted helping the needy as (...)
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  6. A Response to John Taurek's Should the Numbers Count.Nia McCabe - manuscript
    This short essay outlines the problem Taurek responds to and the argument he uses in Should the Numbers Count. His argument posits that in a situation where you can either prevent harm to one stranger or five strangers but you cannot prevent harm to all six, the best thing to do is is give each person an equal chance of survival by flipping a coin. Although this paper is largely an explication, I do provide a short critique of Taurek's argument. (...)
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  7. Compensated Altruism and Moral Autonomy.Theron Pummer - forthcoming - Social Philosophy and Policy.
    It is sometimes morally permissible not to help others even when doing so is overall better for you. For example, you are not morally required to take a career in medicine over a career in music, even if the former is both better for others and better for you. I argue that the permissibility of not helping in a range of cases of “compensated altruism” is explained by the existence of autonomy-based considerations. I sketch a view according to which you (...)
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  8. Commonsense Morality and Contact with Value.Adam Lovett & Stefan Riedener - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (1):1-21.
    There seem to be many kinds of moral duties. We should keep our promises; we should pay our debts of gratitude; we should compensate those we’ve wronged; we should avoid doing or intending harm; we should help those in need. These constitute, some worry, an unconnected heap of duties: the realm of commonsense morality is a disorganized mess. In this paper, we outline a strategy for unifying commonsense moral duties. We argue that they can be understood in terms of contact (...)
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  9. Kant, Vice, and Global Poverty.Karen Stohr - 2023 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 26 (2):271-286.
    In this paper, I argue that within Kantianism, widespread indifference of the global rich to the suffering of the global poor should be understood as resulting at least partly from vice. Kant had much more to say about vice than is often recognized, and it forms a crucial part of his moral anthropology. Kantians should thus attend to the ways in which vice functions as a practical obstacle to fulfilling duties of beneficence. In vice-fueled indifference, inclinations associated with self-love and (...)
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  10. Beneficence and Disability.Sarah Holtman - 2018 - In Adam Cureton & Hill Jr (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 33-49.
    This chapter asks what stance is morally appropriate as we consider when, whether, and how to assist persons experiencing physical, emotional, or intellectual disability. Appealing to a variety of intelligent and observant thinkers for inspiration (Ralph Barton Perry, Helen Keller, and Immanuel Kant), it argues that one important aspect of such a stance is an attitude of reciprocal beneficence. This has three central aspects: a perspective of fellowship acknowledging the disabled and the currently able as members of the community of (...)
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  11. Other-Sacrificing Options: Reply to Lange.Romy Eskens - 2022 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 21 (2).
    In “Other-Sacrificing Options”, Benjamin Lange argues that, when distributing benefits and burdens, we may discount the interests of the people to whom we stand in morally negative relationships relative to the interests of other people. Lange’s case for negative partiality proceeds in two steps. First, he presents a hypothetical example that commonly elicits intuitions favourable to negative partiality. Second, he invokes symmetry considerations to reason from permissible positive partiality towards intimates to permissible negative partiality towards adversaries. In this paper, I (...)
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  12. Kantian Beneficence and the Problem of Obligatory Aid.Karen Stohr - 2011 - Journal of Moral Philosophy 8 (1):45-67.
    Common sense tells us that in certain circumstances, helping someone is morally obligatory. That intuition appears incompatible with Kant's account of beneficence as a wide imperfect duty, and its implication that agents may exercise latitude over which beneficent actions to perform. In this paper, I offer a resolution to the problem from which it follows that some opportunities to help admit latitude and others do not. I argue that beneficence has two components: the familiar wide duty to help others achieve (...)
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Beneficence, Misc
  1. Time and the Duty of Beneficence.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    We have, to some extent, a duty to help the needy—to meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, and health care. Call this the duty of beneficence. Below, I argue that it is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as “a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end” (HILL 2002, 206) and (b) to never behave in a way (via act or omission) that’s factually incompatible with having such an end. (Behaving in a given (...)
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  2. Effective Altruism, Global Justice, and Individual Obligations.Brian Berkey - 2023 - Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy 21:675-692.
    On at least most accounts of what global justice requires, those living in severe poverty around the world are unjustly disadvantaged. Remedying this unjust disadvantage requires (perhaps among other things) that resources currently possessed by well-off people are deployed in ways that will improve the lives of the poor. In this article, I argue that, contrary to the claims of some critics, well-off individuals’ effective altruist giving is at least among the appropriate responses to global injustice. In addition, I suggest (...)
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  3. Reciprocity, Inequality, and Unsuccessful Rescues.Romy Eskens - 2024 - Utilitas 36 (1):64-82.
    Forced choices between rescuing imperilled persons are subject to a presumption of equality. Unless we can point to a morally relevant difference between these persons' imperilments, each should get an equal chance of rescue. Sometimes, this presumption is overturned. For example, when one imperilled person has wrongfully caused the forced choice, most think that this person (rather than an innocent person) should bear the harm. The converse scenario, in which a forced choice resulted from the supererogatory action of one of (...)
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  4. Utilitarianism and Poverty.Brian Berkey - 2023 - In Gottfried Schweiger & Clemens Sedmak (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty. Routledge. pp. 127-137.
    This chapter provides an overview of the most prominent debates about the moral significance and implications of poverty among those who accept a broadly utilitarian account of poverty’s most morally important dimensions. The first section outlines the central features of utilitarian moral theory and describes the basic features of a broadly utilitarian account of poverty’s moral significance. The next section examines the various accounts of the moral obligations of the affluent to contribute to alleviating poverty that have been defended by (...)
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  5. Parity, Pluralism, and Permissible Partiality.Chris Tucker - forthcoming - In Eric Siverman (ed.), Virtuous and Vicious Expressions of Partiality. Routledge.
    We can often permissibly choose a worse self-interested option over a better altruistic alternative. For example, it is permissible to eat out rather than donate the money to feed five hungry children for a single meal. If we eat out, we do something permissibly partial toward ourselves. If we donate, we go beyond the call of moral duty and do something supererogatory. Such phenomena aren’t easy to explain, and they rule out otherwise promising moral theories. Incommensurability and Ruth Chang’s notion (...)
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